Wednesday, July 8, 2009

The System Feature Death Spiral

Is it possible to create a system with the whole lot of features but easy to use and reliable at the same time?

Don’t want to disappoint you, but my answer is pretty pessimistic.

I’d rather say NO.

The thing is that for achieving marketing goals developers strive for more and more functions that only complicate the product and make it quite cumbersome. The reason for this is because vendors try to sell the product demonstrating its new functionality that must beat the functionality of competitors.

The reality is common user daily needs are much simpler and these magic features are not used oftentimes. On the one hand that’s great the system is capable of doing this, this and also that… But I must say that provided functionality is simply redundant in the vast majority of cases.

All that means that as such redundant functions are being created there is no room to properly test it. The end user audience is quite small or simply absent.Thus it really hurts usability and reliability of the product.

The illusion of a rock solution makes sense only for closing a deal. What do you think is the point then?

No comments:

Post a Comment